Living | Gristhttps://grist.org
Working toward a planet that doesn’t burn, a future that doesn’t suck
Mon, 19 Nov 2018 23:39:20 +0000 en
hourly
1 http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/330e84b0272aae748d059cd70e3f8f8d?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs0.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngLiving | Gristhttps://grist.org
Will New York City sink into the sea? A play imagines its future.https://grist.org/article/will-new-york-city-sink-into-the-sea-a-play-imagines-its-future/
Mon, 19 Nov 2018 12:02:09 +0000http://grist.org/?p=409307Like most humans, I’m full of self-deceptive coping mechanisms. New York City residents like me sometimes forget that we live on an island surrounded by rising water. Climate change will likely bring major flooding to New York City every five years, and extreme heat is anticipated to become increasingly fatal. But some artists are taking steps to remind NYC that climate change is personal, as I recently learned on a trip to Sherman Creek Park.

The park, one of Manhattan’s only natural shorelines, runs along the Harlem River in my neighborhood of Washington Heights. When I visited this past Halloween, it was teeming with life and imitations of death. Miniature vampires and ghosts scuttled about the low-lying peninsula in search of candy. Picnic tables were clustered with pumpkins and wholesomely spooky crafts to celebrate Fall Fest, put on by the New York Restoration Project.

There was not much at the event that was genuinely haunting, apart from one table: a display of what the city will look like in the future due to climate change.

A blown-up map of New York City was overlain with blue paint showing where flooding will threaten the area’s shores in 2050. The park itself was partially covered in blue. It’s been submerged before, like when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012.

Melissa Moschitto, a resident of Washington Heights who lived through Hurricane Sandy, explains the flood hazard map to curious passersby. It’s an invitation to engage in conversation about climate change, or to walk just slightly farther to a small peninsula where This Sinking Island, a play directed by Moschitto, is being performed.

The play is the 35-minute brainchild of The Anthropologists, a local theater company that explores social issues through the lens of research and community engagement. They’ve put it on in several locations throughout New York City, including a senior center, library, and children’s museum. Each performance is followed by a conversation with the audience to grapple with how climate change may impact their home.

Jim Anness

The second half of the play is set in a world warmed by 2 degrees C, a benchmark that the recent U.N. report on climate change warns could be the end of coral reefs, Arctic summer ice, and society as we know it. The play follows three sisters who were displaced from their Harlem home in a flood. As they navigate the watery deluge of Manhattan, they meet another refugee who’s covered in plastic. Their first instinct is suspicion — one of the sisters asks, “Are you the one who caused all the plastic straws and bottle caps to wash up on our shore?” (It’s a reminder of the history of xenophobic scapegoating in environmentalism). The sisters realize their own culpability in contributing to the pollution and join the newcomer to try to find safety among the rising waters.

If The Sinking Island offers guidance on how to survive the coming decades, it’s to remind viewers to trust each other and remember each other’s stories. In one scene, the actors try to fend off the encroaching tide, which is symbolized by a long, blue ribbon of fabric. There’s a small sliver of hope in this scene: The actors collectively control the movement of the fabric. So if they work together, they might just fend off the tide.

As the end of the Halloween performance neared, the sun dipped lower over the Harlem River, and the actors sang a final lullaby. They told the parable of a dog who is crying because it is sitting on a nail. A passerby asked, why does the owner not move the dog? The owner replied that when it hurts enough the dog will move on its own.

It’s too late to catch the play if you haven’t seen it already — the performance I went to was the last one scheduled by the troupe. Moshitto says the larger message is that it’s not too late to do something about climate change. But first, despite our fears, we need to work it into our daily awareness.

“It’s always been even difficult just talking about this show,” Moschitto told me in a coffee shop a couple of days after the play. “We’re making a show about climate change and refugees and the irreversible damage that we’re doing to the planet. And bring your kids.” She laughed. “I’m still working on the one-liner.”

]]>sinking island play7963Here’s what 3 Newark residents had to say about the city’s lead crisishttps://grist.org/article/heres-what-3-newark-residents-had-to-say-about-the-citys-lead-crisis/
Wed, 14 Nov 2018 09:00:20 +0000http://grist.org/?p=408966Four years after lead was discovered in Flint’s drinking water, a similar public health crisis is playing out in New Jersey’s most populous city, Newark.

Residents of Newark say over the past year and a half, top city and state officials assured them that their water supply was safe. But as early as 2016, state-run tests that showed elevated lead levels at local schools.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, together with the Newark Education Workers’ Caucus, filed a lawsuit against the city in June, accusing it of violating federal safe drinking water laws. The suit alleges Newark both failed to treat its water properly to prevent lead from leaching off old service pipes into residents’ drinking water and failed to notify residents about the elevated lead levels.

For most of 2018, Newark’s website read: “NEWARK’S WATER IS ABSOLUTELY SAFE TO DRINK,” according to the New York Times. Since the lawsuit was filed, the city has sprung into action, giving away 40,000 water filters across the city of 285,000 people and telling parents their children should not drink the water.

The situation has drawn parallels to the Flint water crisis. “The actual facts of what happened in Flint may not be the exact same, but the overall arc of what happened is,” Mae Wu, an attorney and water expert at the NRDC, told Grist.

The revelation of this potentially widening public health crisis has angered many Newark residents. Here are three community members’ experiences, as told to Grist reporter Paola Rosa-Aquino. Their statements have been edited for length and clarity.

Though the city of Newark is distributing water filters, like these, for residents to mitigate lead levels in their homes, residents say there are not enough for those who need them. Image courtesy of Shakima Thomas

Debra Salters, community activist

I live in a building in the East Ward. We didn’t get water filters. The people who had something to say about it — the activists — we were turned away. We’re actually meeting with our building’s owners next week to find out what the situation is and if they can get the water tested.

Even now, not everyone who lives here knows about the lead in the water. More and more people are finding out, from family members out of state and other cities. Not only are we drinking the water, we’re bathing in it. We’re brushing our teeth in it. We’re washing our hair with it. It’s affecting our entire life here and no one seems to care, until the lawsuit, until they were made to care.

None of the top officials have really done anything to make the public aware of the public health crisis. They denied there was a problem when we, the citizens, were digging up information and bringing it to them to make sure. First, we found out about the lead in schools, and they tried to tell us the water was OK to drink at home. If you’re saying the water is not good in the schools, then how is it fine in our homes, if it’s all coming from the same source? We were shooed away like gnats at a barbecue.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka (left) looks on as Senior Aide Andrea Mason (center) speaks to residents at a town hall concerning the city’s lead problem.Image courtesy of Shakima Thomas

Yvette Jordan, teacher and member of Newark Education Workers Caucus

My concern as well as other educators who I have spoken with, of course, is our students as well as small children and those most vulnerable, including elderly and women who are pregnant. We felt we represented a cross-section of our city and especially of those who would be impacted. A couple of us who were homeowners or parents of small children — we felt emotional about this. We could really speak to it with some credibility. My own home’s water was found to be 42.2 parts per billion which is over the federal threshold for lead.

Our teachers’ group was approached by the Natural Resource Defense Council and they asked if we could join them in a lawsuit against the City of Newark. We asked, “Why?” They said, “Well, your water actually rivals Flint, Michigan.” We were alarmed. We said we’d join them.

I mentioned it in my classroom with my students. Some students have heard something and others don’t know what I’m talking about. I feel it’s a failure of public trust in coming forward and saying exactly what is happening.

I think a lot of times people who are affiliated with those who are in power try to downplay what is going on. They try to say to those who are speaking out about it are being irresponsible, that we shouldn’t say anything because it will scare the public. Well, guess what? They should be scared.

Shakima Thomas’s son, 4, bathes in water in Newark, New Jersey. Image courtesy of Shakima Thomas

Shakima Thomas, social worker

I pay for water and it’s really confusing for me that I have to pay for toxic water. What I’m paying is not adding up to the service that I’m getting. I don’t appreciate it, especially as a hard working person. Even as a mom, I have to protect my son, who’s a four-year-old. He’s okay and doesn’t have any elevated levels of lead in his bloodstream, but this still is a public health disaster.

It’s people’s lives. Who wants to have lead in your bloodstream? Who wants that? None of us. We were just exposed to this toxic water. It’s horrible. I think it should be a federal class action lawsuit against this city. That’s what I would think. And I think that we should be reimbursed from the time that administration knew about the lead in the water up until now. From 2016 to now, I feel as though my fees for water should be waived, because I was buying poison, and it wasn’t even consensual. I’m not just going to go out there willingly purchasing poison. I’m just not gonna do that. So, that’s what makes this even more of a scandal.

The mayor keeps saying that this isn’t like Flint. It is the same as Flint in the way that they tried to cover it up. It’s the same thing. We were victimized by this administration. They gamble with our health. They put politics first before justice.

]]>Lead pipes water New JerseyTree of Life and our deadly climate of changehttps://grist.org/article/tree-of-life-and-our-deadly-climate-of-change/
Fri, 02 Nov 2018 18:41:56 +0000http://grist.org/?p=408242As the rest of the country tried to figure out why Robert Bowers had targeted Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the worst anti-Semitic massacre on American soil, news reportstied the shooting to a partnership between HIAS, the Jewish refugee-resettling organization, and Dor Hadash, one of the congregations that meet at the temple.

Dor Hadash was the congregation I grew up in, a bit of a raggedy and itinerant troupe of Reconstructionists (basically progressive Jews). In my 29 years of life, our little temple has wandered across the eastern Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill from the Hebrew Institute to St. Philomena’s Church (sorry, Jesus, we had to take the cross down) to Tree of Life’s giant, modern synagogue. I spent seven years in the temple’s school Dor L’Dor — a similarly scruffy affair that shifted between the living rooms belonging to its students’ families — where we learned how to read inky characters from right to left and about tzedakah.

Tzedakah loosely means “charity,” but more specifically refers to a mandatory contribution to the well-being of the world. (It literally translates to “justice.”) It’s one of the main tenets of Judaism, and our little-kid understanding of it was studiously stuffing spare coins and dollar bills into a tin box every week. At the end of each year, we’d sit around our tiny coffer and decide which charitable cause would get our saved-up tzedakah. As I recall, we usually bankrolled tree-planting in Israel, because you couldn’t actually do very much with whatever cash four 7-year-olds had to offer.

Every year, a committee of Hadashamites (as my parents call our tribe) gathers together to Ent-ishly deliberate which will be their charitable cause of the year. Last year, according to my mother — one of the deciding elders — the group was choosing between committing to refugees or the environment. Today, she does not know how to deal with the fact that she sat around a table and took part in a decision that might have lead to Robert Bowers’ vicious, violent attack on our community, killing 11 people and injuring six at a Shabbat morning service.

I have spent hours every day since the Tree of Life shooting on the phone with my mother. I want to assure her that she is wrong when she fears she played any role in what happened last weekend. Robert Bowers’ cowardice has almost nothing to do with that single choice — which may have seemed negligible and even mundane at the time — while surveying the glut of injustices needing their resources.

The distinction between directing the congregation’s tzedakah toward the environment or refugees is narrower than it seems. Donald Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric and nonstop attacks on Muslim and Latin American immigrants make the peaceful resettling of refugees a dire issue. And that sort of visibility and urgency provides a foil to the conundrum of what “taking on the environment” even means. It’s such a big and impossibly amorphous concept.

These days, environmental stewardship is actually far less planting trees in Israel and more finding new homes for people who have been forced to leave theirs due to changing climate and natural disasters — like the cruelly maligned “migrant caravan” or victims of the Syrian crisis, or any of the Pacific Islanders who have seen their shores subsumed. The social action committee of Dor Hadash simply chose to address the human consequence of altered ecosystems.

Robert Bowers hates refugees and Jews and Muslims and Latinos and people who do not look like him because he is fearful of change. He is afraid of a world that looks less like the one he imagines is right. But that world is upon us whether or not Robert Bowers wants it, and his efforts are as futile as they are atrocious.

Jews will not heal all the world’s ailments alone. Dor Hadash will not heal all of them alone. My mother will not heal all of them alone. No single person or congregation or ethnic group is responsible for fixing every wrong. But I wrote, in the aftermath of the devastating IPCC report, that we cannot be overwhelmed by the sum total of all of those wrongs. We simply have to break them down and pick the ones we will tackle.

Dor Hadash did its duty to God and Earth and human society and picked its issue for the year. That selection was not the reason Robert Bowers attacked them. He attacked my home, my temple, my community because he is a coward who sees change and is terrified rather than galvanized.

Our new world under climate change is terrifying in many ways. But we cannot go back in time, and it’s useless to try. The best way to survive is to determine how to flourish in the new world — and Jews have been surviving for millennia, so we’ve developed some pretty good strategies.

I am mourning. I am praying every day for the healing of my mother and my family and the families of my temple and my home and my Earth. I will not waste one more thought on Robert Bowers. He is a relic of an expired world that we have no time for.

]]>Vigil-Tree-of-LifeFlorida’s toxic algae gets the Daily Show treatmenthttps://grist.org/article/floridas-toxic-algae-gets-the-daily-show-treatment/
Wed, 31 Oct 2018 23:36:28 +0000http://grist.org/?p=408135Algae, commonly found in health food stores or clustered along the side of pool, might not appear dangerous. But don’t be fooled. South Florida is currently suffering from a massive algae crisis. The nasty sludge turns tourists away, provokes asthma attacks, and kills manatees. It’s such a mess that algae has turned into a campaign issue in the race for the U.S. Senate.

The Daily Show went full-on Miami Vice to get to the bottom of it. Comedians Roy Wood Jr. and Michael Kosta suited up like Crockett and Tubbs, learning along the way that the toxic fumes from algae can cause liver damage and make it hard for beachgoers to breathe.

As the faux-detectives sip sugary cocktails, Miami Herald environmental reporter Jenny Staletovich tells them that the sugar industry’s farming practices are partly to blame for the algae issues.

]]>miami-viceClimate change could double the cost of your beerhttps://grist.org/article/climate-change-could-double-the-cost-of-your-beer/
Tue, 16 Oct 2018 22:32:04 +0000http://grist.org/?p=407288This storywas originally published by Wiredand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.

Beer drinkers might pay more for and find less of their favorite beverage as climate change comes for barley. Scientists expect that extreme droughts and heat waves will become more frequent and intense in the regions that grow the grain.

Many farmers are already adapting to the slowly warming planet — with advanced plant breeding techniques to create more drought-resistant grains, for example, and by using more efficient irrigation systems to conserve water — but a new study out Monday in the journal Nature Plants says that many regions won’t be able to cope with the arid conditions of the future. The work was done by a group of researchers in China along with Steven J. Davis, an environmental scientist at the University of California Irvine.

The team looked at the areas around the world that grow barley, which is turned into malt for beer, and projected what will occur under five different climate warming scenarios by 2100. Using models of both economic activity and climate change, the group made predictions about what will happen to barley production, as well as beer price and consumption.

During the most severe climate events, the study predicts that global beer consumption would decline by 16 percent, an amount about equal to the total annual beer consumption of the United States in 2011. It also expects average beer prices to double. Each country would be affected differently. The price of a single pint of beer in Ireland, for example, will rise by $4.84, followed by $4.52 in Italy and $4.34 in Canada. American tipplers will see beer prices rise up to $1.94 under the extreme events, the study said, and barley farmers will export more to other nations.

Davis, who has published several papers on climate change and the Chinese economy, says many extreme drought and heat events will force farmers to feed barley to livestock instead of selling it to domestic breweries. “When we have these shortages, our models suggest people are going to feed the barley to the livestock before they make beer,” Davis said. “That makes sense. This is a luxury commodity and it’s more important to have food on the table.”

The effects of climate change are already being felt by craft brewers, says Katie Wallace, director of social and environmental responsibility at New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado. In 2014, the U.S. barley-growing region — Montana, North Dakota, and Idaho — was hit by an extremely wet and warm winter that caused crops to sprout early, rendering much of it useless. Farmers were forced to tap into reserves in storage.

In 2017 and again this past summer, the Pacific Northwest was hit by severe drought that affected production of hops that give unique flavors to craft brews. Wallace says that climate change is on the minds of all craft brewers as they plan for how to avoid future shortages of both barley and hops. “It’s stressful,” Newman said. “We are seeing an increased level of vulnerability and some near escapes in some cases. All of these things have happened periodically, but the frequency is growing.”

The craft beer industry is already planning for the future, says Chris Swersey, a supply chain specialist at the Brewer’s Association, a trade group that represents 4,500 small breweries across the country. Swersey says he is skeptical of the paper’s findings, mainly because it assumes that the amount and location of barley production will stay the same as it is today. He says barley growing is already moving north to Canada, while researchers are hoping to expand barley’s range with winter-hardy breeds.

“The industry is already aware that barley production is shifting,” Swersey says. “We need to be thinking ahead and be smart about what is our climate going to look like 50 or 100 years from now.”

It’s not just the little guys who are thinking of climate change. The king of U.S. beer production remains Budweiser, which produces the No. 1 (Bud Light) and No. 3 (Budweiser) top-selling brands. Budweiser buys barley from a vast network of farmers in the northern U.S. and is investing in new breeds of drought-resistant barley strains, according to Jessica Newman, director of agronomy for Budweiser. “It’s all about getting the right varieties, getting the right mix, and getting the right technology to our growers,” Newman says from her office in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

She says Budweiser’s crop science lab in Colorado is working on new barley strains dubbed Voyager, Merit 57, and Growler. “We are breeding for drought resistance and sprout resistance,” Newman said. “If we see rainfall coming earlier, or if it rains in the wrong time of year, the barley can sprout and it wouldn’t be used. We also want it to use less water and fewer agricultural chemicals.”

Climate scientist Davis says he and his colleagues wrote the study as a thought exercise to perhaps stoke conversation about how climate change affects our daily lives. “A paper on beer might seem a little bit frivolous when it’s dealing with a topic that poses existential threats,” Davis said. “But some of us have a personal love of beer and thought this might be interesting.” Climate change won’t just alter the weather; it’ll also hit our grocery tabs and hobbies.

]]>FRANCE-BEER-FESTIVALWe’re just beginning to understand the toll climate change takes on mental healthhttps://grist.org/article/were-just-beginning-to-understand-the-toll-climate-change-takes-on-mental-health/
Mon, 15 Oct 2018 05:05:23 +0000http://grist.org/?p=407109When psychiatrist Janet Lewis thinks back to the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, she still remembers the horizontal trees and the collective grief. In her town of Charleston, South Carolina, there was “sadness and desolation,” she says. “You can kind of feel like your whole world is turned upside down when the environment isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”

There’s a word for this experience: “solastagia.” The term, coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, refers to the specific kind of climate-induced anxiety that comes from witnessing the destruction of your home environment.

Along with causing existential worry, climate change upends ecosystems, destabilizes economies, intensifies natural disasters, and brings heat waves — all things that can contribute to mental health issues. Lewis, a member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, explains that this kind of destabilization “is disruptive to peoples’ lives in practical ways, as well as being psychologically disturbing.”

If past storms are a testament, Hurricane Michael and Hurricane Florence will have far-reaching effects on mental health. Hurricane Maria left Puerto Rico residents in a state of prolonged darkness, literally and psychologically. After her hometown went two months without electricity last year, Maria survivor Gina Dacosta told Grist, “I was not willing to cope with that emotionally. I was going insane.” And New York City experienced lasting mental health devastation after Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012: Five years later, the rate of adult psychiatric hospitalizations on the Rockaway Peninsula was nearly double that of the city as a whole.

The toll that climate change takes on mental health can be hard to quantify, but researchers recently made headway in documenting this important relationship. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences marks one of the first large-scale studies on the mental health impact of climate change.

The researchers brought together meteorological and climatic data with reported mental health difficulties drawn from nearly 2 million randomly sampled U.S. residents. They found that exposure to extreme weather, monthly increases in average temperature, and hurricanes all worsen mental health conditions.

Previous studies have looked at climate change’s impact on mood and on suicide. However, there hasn’t been much research between those extremes, says Nick Obradovich, the lead author on the study and a researcher at MIT’s Media Lab. To capture that middle ground, Obradovich and his team used the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s collected responses to the question: “Now thinking about your mental health, which includes stress, depression, and problems with emotions, for how many days during the past 30 days was your mental health not good?”

They found that when the average monthly temperature in already hot places got even hotter — shifting from 77-86 degrees F to above that range — there was a 0.5 percent increase in self-reported mental health issues. It sounds small, but if extrapolated across the current U.S. population over a 30-day period, that increase would lead to almost 2 million additional individuals reporting mental health difficulties.

The systems we have in place aren’t equipped to handle this influx of mental health issues, says psychiatrist Elizabeth Haase, another member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance. She says it may require rethinking and restructuring our mental health care system, with an emphasis on community-based and value-based health care, where medical professionals are paid based on outcome.

The American Psychiatry Association acknowledged the potential toll of climate change last year in a position statement. It vowed to “support and collaborate with patients, communities, and other healthcare organizations engaged in efforts to mitigate the adverse health and mental health effects of climate change,” yet no substantial actions have been taken to this end. Lewis says many fields have dealt with similar inertia because climate change requires a different kind of thinking.

“We have to be thinking of this as one, big slow moving disaster,” she says. “And that’s a different mindset.”

]]>HUGO ANNIVERSARYIs Sarah Silverman comedy’s new climate champion?https://grist.org/article/is-sarah-silverman-comedys-new-climate-champion/
Fri, 12 Oct 2018 22:16:49 +0000http://grist.org/?p=407098Finding humor in climate change isn’t easy (trust us!). That’s especially true this week, when U.N. scientists handed the world a big, scary report saying we’re on the road to catastrophe and Hurricane Michael carved a path of devastation through the Florida Panhandle. But Sarah Silverman is up for the challenge. The comedian delivered a nine-minute plea for climate action on Thursday in the latest episode of her Hulu show I Love You, America.

“I know climate change is not the most exciting issue, and the media knows it too, which is part of why it’s covered so infrequently,” Silverman said. She pointed to MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes’ controversial tweet in which he said climate change is a “palpable ratings killer” for news shows and so “the incentives are not great.”

“I feel compelled to use my platform to speak out,” Silverman said. “Granted, my platform is on the third largest streaming network of three, so it’s not so much shouting from the rooftops as like complaining from an open mic at Panera Bread.”

Silverman covered a ton of ground in the segment, from scientists’ terrifying climate predictions to the “it’s a hoax” views of President Trump, who she calls a “Fox News grandpa.” Here’s a clip of her explaining how “absurdly rich and powerful people” are ruining the planet for the rest of us (the full thing is on Hulu):

“The only option is that we react to this massive state of emergency with massive action,” Silverman said. She brought up climate change on her show last month, too, explaining the Trump administration’s rollback of methane regulations.

Silverman isn’t the only comedian taking on climate change: Jimmy Kimmel and Trevor Noah also came up with jokes about the scary U.N. report … somehow.

So are comedians good messengers for climate change? Perhaps! A study from earlier this year found that humor, rather than fear or straightforward facts, got young people the most excited about taking action on climate change.

]]>Fun Lovers Unite Gun Sense EventEconomic uncertainty already hung over the heads of Puerto Rico’s children. Then came Maria.https://grist.org/article/economic-uncertainty-already-hung-over-the-heads-of-puerto-ricos-children-then-came-maria/
Fri, 28 Sep 2018 17:00:05 +0000http://grist.org/?p=406309More than a year has passed since Hurricane Maria pummeled Puerto Rico, but Bethlyn Avilez and her family are still grappling with the irrevocable upheaval. Avilez lives in the central Puerto Rican municipality of Ciales with her husband and her two young boys, 9-year-old Xarquier and 4-year-old Xanier.

After the storm’s 155 mph winds and intense rainfall had torn through the island, causing a nearby bridge to collapse and a nearby river to rise, the family swam to a neighbor’s house. When the swollen river completely submerged their home, Xarquier intently watched the drastic devastation unfold from his neighbor’s window.

“He saw his things floating — his toys, his clothes, everything,” Avilez told Grist in her native Spanish. When the family finally trekked to its home two days after the storm had passed, Xarquier grasped the full scope of the wreckage.

“He told me all he felt was sadness — that he’d lost everything, that things weren’t the same,” Avilez added.

That sentiment hangs over the Avilez family today. A new normal has yet to arrive. Avilez estimates it took three to four months for Xarquier to return to school — and finding supplies and clothes was a struggle since many stores were either closed or inaccessible. The family is still living in Avilez’s parents house while its works on finding a new home to start from scratch.

As part of the “Maria Generation,” stories like that of Avilez’s children are not unique. Long before the hurricane, economic uncertainty had shaped the experience of Puerto Rican youth: The territory already had the highest percentage of childhood poverty in the nation, at 57 percent. (Compare that to slightly more than 15 percent nationwide.)

Now, preliminary findings from a study out this week reveal that increased economic hardship following Maria, coupled with inadequate access to health and education, is further affecting the wellbeing and development of young people.

The study involved interviews with more than 700 Puerto Rican households with children under 18 years of age between July and September of 2018. Researchers used a three-pronged approach: looking at the extent to which economics, health, and education had levied deep-seeded impacts on children.

The findings are pretty grim. Following Maria’s onslaught on the island, about a third of households surveyed had reduced incomes due to loss of employment and reduced work hours. Low-income families suffered disproportionately by this erosion of income. According to the study, they reported difficulty paying utilities, buying food, and clothing.

Children, especially impoverished youth, are struggling in Maria’s wake. The study reveals that 44 percent of minors exhibited new behaviors after the hurricane — with 23 percent of that group experiencing anxiety. Children under 5 years old went an average of 92 days without attending preschool, while children between 5 and 17 years old are estimated to have spent an average of 78 days away from school. Further, 3 out of 10 children with disabilities that require medication for treatment had difficulty obtaining it after the hurricane.

“This study shows that families with children, who were facing significant challenges before the hurricane, are facing even more bleak conditions today,” said Anitza Cox, director of analysis and social policy at Estudios Técnicos, the firm that helped administer the survey. “This type of economic insecurity is what has led to families leaving in droves over the last decade, and what will continue to drive it if comprehensive policies are not put into place immediately.”

Indeed, more than 30 percent of households surveyed indicated that they are very likely or likely to move due to Hurricane Maria. In Florida alone, 200,000 Puerto Ricans arrived within the first two months after the storm made landfall.

Avilez considered being part of the subsequent mass migration, but ultimately felt that she needed to face this newfound reality head-on.

“If I had left, I’d be running away,” she told Grist. “I wanted to be brave. And so, we started over.”

The latest world-changing idea for agriculture sprouted three years ago, not from a field but from a computer lab.

In 2015, Caleb Harper, an MIT Media Lab research scientist, wowed the audience at a TED Conference in Geneva with his vision for personal food computers: automated, indoor hydroponic gardens capable of downloading and replicating the conditions needed to create perfect parsley, excellent escarole, and beautiful broccoli. Harper seized the audience’s attention by telling them that the average apple in a supermarket is 11 months old. He then presented an alternative to a global food system that is draining aquifers, polluting waterways, and burning fossil fuels to ship produce thousands of miles — all to deliver less-than-fresh food to consumers who end up throwing out roughly a third of it uneaten.

Harper’s big idea, a project he called the Open Agriculture Initiative, was to unleash the innovative power of the internet on agriculture by means of wetware — tech that merges edible plants with silicon chips. Empowered with free, open-source software and food computer designs, he argued, we could all soon be experimenting with crops, sharing our discoveries, and fixing environmental problems. Imagine reducing our dependence on centralized Big Agriculture and growing more food more sustainably by bringing the farm into the home — or at least into the city limits — and building a distributed network of a billion nerd farmers.

Though the technology is still evolving, the open-source model should feel familiar to growers. Information sharing has been a part of the farming ethos for centuries. Agricultural co-ops, extension offices, and land-grant universities were all set up long ago to provide farmers with easy access to best practices and troubleshooting tips.

RICK FRIEDMAN / Corbis via Getty Images

Now, the addition of automation and open-source software could, in principle, take crop production to a new level. Just look at what happened when the open-source model was applied to the nascent internet: We got the Firefox browser and Apache web server, the Linux and Android operating systems, Wikipedia, and myriad other leaps in capability.

Applied to agriculture, Harper reasoned, the open-source approach could reverse a generations-long slide into increasingly concentrated control over agriculture. A century ago, one American worker in three was a farmer. Today, just one in 85 is. Four companies now control about 90 percent of the world’s grain supply, and the top four strains of wheat capture 95 percent of the market.

Food computers could recycle precious freshwater and eliminate the need to use toxic chemicals to protect crops from pests, disease, and competitors. Online gardens could inject new creativity into cultivation and yield new vegetable varieties optimized for flavor or nutritional value rather than for size and shelf life.

Harper’s vision is inspiring, to be sure. But to challenge the globe-spanning titan that is Big Ag, the new technology must expand quickly in two directions at once: horizontal growth, through a burgeoning community of enthusiasts; and vertical growth, through the commercial growers who have tipped flat farms skyward, planting crops in tall stacks inside indoor food factories. Numerous startups in North America and Asia are now trying to grow high-value crops close to city centers this way. The big question that Harper’s big idea faces is, how far can this technology really go?

#Nerdfarmers

Harper’s high-flying rhetoric lit a fire in computer nerds around the world, who started buzzing about this irresistibly cool idea of the personal food computer. Peter Webb, a 23-year-old business-development analyst working at a food-display company in St. Louis, saw the TED talk and resolved to reduce Harper’s grand plans to practice.

But Webb and other similarly inspired hackers soon slammed into two large barriers. The first was money: the design that MIT released was available in kit form, but it cost around $5,000, well beyond the budget of most enthusiasts. Then there was the daunting amount of effort needed to make the technology, which was still as buggy as a termite mound, actually work. So the first step was to come up with simplified blueprints and software that could work smoothly at less than a tenth of the original cost.

Nobody in the enthusiast group was going to be able to accomplish this alone — but a bunch of nobodies working together could. Webb proposed some ideas on an MIT online forum. Harper responded with encouragement, and two other like-minded St. Louis residents, Joe O’Brien and Jim Bell, joined Webb in the effort. They then connected with Drew Thomas, an experienced builder. Bit by bit, a team of hackers, driven purely by the excitement of solving a puzzle, coalesced from the ether.

The team’s first goal was to build a “minimum viable product” — Silicon Valley lingo meaning the simplest, cheapest version that early adopters will be willing to use. Rather than trying to impress the ghost of Steve Jobs with a design, the thinking goes, teams should kludge together something quickly in order to understand all the ways it fails, as well as the unexpected ways it might succeed.

After kicking around various ideas, Thomas said, “I basically drank a bunch of beers after going to Lowe’s, and built one.” The hardest part was getting so many disparate kinds of hardware — a water pump, a fan, a camera, multiple sensors, and the computer — to work together reliably. They roped in Peter’s father, Howard Webb, a retired computer whiz. “The one thing I wish I had known before I began was how addictive DIY tinkering becomes,” he says.

By August 2017, after a few months of dead ends and restarts, they had it: a small hydroponic food computer built for under $300. The ten-person group, which now proudly referred to itself as #nerdfarmers, published its shopping list and carefully documented construction steps on the MIT forum. Before long, others from all over the world started reporting their own construction progress and offering refinements to the design. A chain reaction had begun.

Scaling up

AeroFarms

Take a warehouse full of oversized personal food computers and stack them to the ceiling: that’s a vertical farm. While Webb and the open-source community are scaling the concept outward, companies such as Plenty and AeroFarms are scaling it upward in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Newark.

AeroFarms’ leafy greens factory in New Jersey is the largest vertical farm in the world, but it looks like any other building in its industrial neighborhood of Newark, where airplanes roar overhead and trains chug past. Years ago, the company bought an old mill here and retrofitted it to forge vegetables instead of steel. When you open the door, a blast of air hits you full-force. Pressure replaces toxic chemicals: because pathogens, pollen, and insects can’t get in, there is no need to spray the greens with anything other than water. To be on the safe side, people entering the farm must first sanitize their shoes, wash their hands, and don hair nets, safety goggles, jackets, and gloves.

Panels of LED lamps hang inches above each tray, bathing the leaves in light adjusted to just the right spectrum and intensity, while spritzes of customized nutrient solutions moisten the roots hanging below. It’s a botanical spa for herbs.

The cleanroom-like conditions aren’t just about food safety, says Marc Oshima, the company’s chief marketing officer. “We’re creating a utopia for the plants,” he says. It’s also a kind of utopia for plant scientists, whose field experiments are often confounded by fungi, bugs, drought, and other uncontrolled variables. Inside AeroFarms’ utopian growth chambers, managers control virtually every variable as they monitor what makes plants thrive, optimizing conditions for peak flavor and nutrition. “We’re harvesting data as much as we are harvesting plants,” Oshima says.

Inside the growing room, stacks of white trays full of plants tower 12 layers, to the 36-foot ceiling. Panels of LED lamps hang inches above each tray, bathing the leaves in light adjusted to just the right spectrum and intensity, while spritzes of customized nutrient solutions moisten the roots hanging below. It’s a botanical spa for herbs. The air, humid and comfortably temperate, smells like spring growth after an overnight rain. Visitors instinctively inhale deeply.

In such brave new farms, the entrepreneurs tell their venture capitalists, science and commerce are joining forces to reverse the spread of agriculture by expanding up, rather than out. Oshima boasts proudly about the environmental benefits: 95 percent less water used per kilogram of produce, zero insecticides, all fertilizer captured and recycled. Sophisticated climate controls allow a vertical farm, in principle, to recreate all 13 USDA growing zones under one roof. That makes these farms a hedge against climate change. And sitting vertical farms inside the cities they serve dramatically reduces the energy needed to transport food from farm to table.

That’s the pitch, anyway, and it has worked. Venture capitalists have been pouring money into vertical-farm startups in recent years, investing a record $271 million in 2017.

Excess energy needed

When it comes to energy, vertical farms have yet to live up to their green hype. All those lamps and pumps and climate-control systems gulp electricity around the clock — and that electricity is usually made, with only about 40 percent efficiency, by burning fossil fuels.

We aren’t likely to see vertical farms that generate all their needed energy from renewable sources. Bruce Bugbee, a scientist at Utah State University who studies indoor farming, estimated in 2015 that you would need at least five acres of solar panels to produce enough power to light just one acre of crops in a vertical farm. Energy inevitably falls away each time it changes form, from sunlight to electricity and then back to light. Inventors have been squeezing those conversion losses toward their limits, but there is no cheating the second law of thermodynamics — or the fact that the construction and climate control of vertical farms consume a lot of energy as well.

In fact, all things considered, says Mark Bomford, director of the Yale Sustainable Food Project, “it’s generally a lower-impact proposition to move food around the planet than to move the climate.”

That environmental inequality could change direction, however, if we find ourselves with more electricity than we know what to do with in the future. A few timely breakthroughs in cheap photovoltaic film might allow us to plaster solar cells over every window and glass skyscraper. Before we even get close to replacing all fossil fuels with renewables, solar farms will pump out way more electricity than we can use — whenever the sun is unobscured and directly overhead­ — because the dirty secret of renewables is that their inconstancy forces us to overbuild capacity. (Already, wholesale electric prices go negative in California when the sun is high, as grid operators scramble to find customers to take excess solar power.)

A similar embarrassment of riches could occur if engineers figure out fusion energy or better nuclear power and if we replace all our polluting generators with reactors. We could keep those plants humming at night, when demand is low, and shunt the clean, cheap electrons into vertical farms.

In the meantime, says Leo Marcelis, a vertical-farming researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, indoor farmers could rig their grow lights to switch on and off to take advantage of periodic dips in electricity prices. Their plants would take a little longer to mature, but they would still thrive.

Bomford, however, is unpersuaded by such scenarios. “I’m concerned about the opportunity cost,” he says. “If the vertical farm is using low-carbon energy, it means there is some other area that doesn’t have the opportunity to use it” — for example, recharging electric vehicles, running automated factories, or making hydrogen to power fuel cells.

Good for veggies, not for grains

Setting energy aside, the environmental pros of vertical farms do seem to outweigh their cons, but only for high-value, fast-growing crops. Peek inside most vertical farms or food computers, and there is an excellent chance you’ll see leafy greens such as lettuce or herbs.

The technology shines brightest for such crops. Dan Blaustein-Rejto, an agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, has calculated that indoor farms in Sweden, where nuclear and hydroelectric power generate 90 percent of the electricity, can already grow lettuce with a slightly smaller carbon footprint than conventional farms produce. He showed that outdoor farms fall behind in the carbon race when you factor in transportation and waste. Indoor lettuce isn’t vulnerable to hailstorms or armyworms, and it’s not as likely to go bad in transit since it won’t be moving from California to New York. Indoor farmers also need less fertilizer because the nutrients can be recycled. One-third of the nitrogen applied to fields, in contrast, is converted to polluting gases or washed away to turn ponds into pools of green slime. Over the longer term, cropland put out of work by indoor farms could even be used to grow carbon-storing forests.

The math may work out for lettuce and certain other vegetables when energy is cheap and green enough. But the numbers don’t add up for grains, which account for the vast majority of farming. To clean up the oxygen-deprived dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi, for example, we’ll have to figure out new ways of growing corn. Or, as Bomford puts it: “The Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force was not formed in response to rapacious arugula expansion in Iowa.”

Though it might be technically possible to move our amber waves of grain indoors, Marcelis says, “it will take a long time — let’s prove it with vegetables first.” A blade of wheat needs five months to produce a kernel, whereas microgreens can be harvested every few days. And dry, hard grains are a breeze to store and transport compared to spring mix, which is little more than water packed into millions of gossamer cells.

A farm in every home?

As with every new technology, it’s easy to see the flaws and limitations in food computers and vertical farms. But it’s worth contemplating how this technology might feed into other big trends in food and agriculture as it evolves. In the United States and other wealthy nations, consumer demand for locally grown, organic, and heirloom produce has been growing rapidly. The number of farmers markets has doubled every decade since the government started keeping track in 1994. The number of households growing vegetables has also risen, particularly within the past five years. Houses — and kitchens in particular — have been getting larger and more automated. All of this suggests fertile ground for the idea of high-tech gardens.

Sensing an opportunity, some companies have started selling kitchen countertop farms. Three square feet seems to be enough space to keep a small family in lettuce. If you can devote an entire wall or basement room to a food computer, it could probably supply all your staple vegetables.

Hard-core gardeners and gadget lovers are likely to be the early adopters, attracted not by any cost savings but by the novelty and the ability to experiment on their food. The appliances will get cheaper, more useful, and more stylish as nerd farmers keep innovating. Webb and Thomas have already cofounded a startup called MARSfarm that makes food computer kits for schools. Before long, many children might first experience a garden by tending to the artificially illuminated hydroponics box in their classroom.

Drew Thomas and Peter WebbMarsFARMS

Early skeptics of vertical farms, such as Cornell University agricultural economist Per Pinstrup-Andersen, are now finding it easier to imagine a future in which the farms catch on. Back in 2010, Andersen dismissed the notion of vertical farming “as a mere pipe dream.” Last year, he wrote that he has “become an agnostic” and believes the technology is actually approaching a tipping point. Going vertical, he points out, could take much of the risk (and associated insurance costs) out of farming. It could make transportation more efficient and ensure a steady supply of healthful nutrients as climate change and population growth threaten to make them scarce.

Leo Marcelis, from his home in the Netherlands, finds it easy to envision how food production could move inside. This tiny country is the world’s second-largest exporter of produce, in large part because it grows 35 percent of its produce — and 100 percent of its tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers — indoors. At the edges of Dutch cities, farmers grow leafy greens and herbs indoors in warehouses. The production cost is double that of greenhouse-grown greens, but consumers hardly notice because the money paid to the farmer accounts for only about a quarter of the price of a head of lettuce.

Because most plant varieties have been optimized for Big Ag and long-distance distribution, plant biologists can explore many new avenues to find cultivars that will perform even better when grown inside. Marcelis’s experiments, for instance, suggest that fine-tuning the lights in a food computer could double the shelf life of lettuce and double the vitamin C in tomatoes. A generation from now, mothers may pass along to their kids their favorite recipe for tomatoes along with the family recipe for tomato sauce.

Eat what you like

If the past century of food retailing has hammered one lesson home, it is that people love to have options. They are eager to try new things, and many see their dietary choices as part of their identity. In the food industry, fresh produce remains one of the last true commodities, but automated agriculture could open the door to branded and even personalized veggies. If that leads to a renaissance in the quality of fresh fruits and vegetables, it could be a boon for arteries and waistlines as well as for the environment.

But even if this technology falls short of mass adoption, it could still serve as a massively networked food-science laboratory, a way to harness the collective intelligence of nerd farmers around the world and apply it to some of our toughest food problems. Despite his doubts about the commercial viability of vertical farms, Bomford sees real opportunity for building knowledge.

“They offer a level of control that is quite laboratory-like,” he said. “They could be something like Biosphere II [the massive ecosystem in a glass bubble that failed as a self-contained replacement for nature’s life-support systems but was repurposed as a tool for science], which started out as a ridiculous cautionary tale but is now an experimental tool with a high output of empirical understanding.”

Webb, in his new role as an evangelist for personal food computers, takes a broader view of the technology’s potential to democratize the food supply. “When companies own the entire food system, that’s scary,” he says. To truly serve a diversity of tastes, he says, “you need diversity in control.”

]]>AeroFarms vertical farm lights LEDsAn army of deer ticks carrying Lyme disease is advancing. It will only get worse.https://grist.org/article/an-army-of-deer-ticks-carrying-lyme-disease-is-advancing-it-will-only-get-worse/
Sat, 11 Aug 2018 13:00:27 +0000http://grist.org/?p=403488This story was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity and was co-published with Mother Jones. It is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Maine’s invasion came early this year. In recent hotbeds of tick activity — from Scarborough to Belfast and Brewer — people say they spotted the eight-legged arachnid before spring. They noticed the ticks — which look like moving poppy seeds — encroaching on roads, beaches, playgrounds, cemeteries, and library floors. They saw them clinging to dogs, birds, and squirrels.

By May, people were finding the ticks crawling on their legs, backs, and necks. Now, in midsummer, daily encounters seem almost impossible to avoid.

Maine is home to 15 tick species but only one public health menace: the blacklegged tick — called the “deer” tick — a carrier of Lyme and other debilitating diseases. For 30 years, an army of deer ticks has advanced from the state’s southwest corner some 350 miles to the Canadian border, infesting towns such as Houlton, Limestone, and Presque Isle.

“It’s horrifying,” says Dora Mills, director of the Center for Excellence in Health Innovation at the University of New England in Portland. Mills, 58, says she never saw deer ticks in her native state until 2000.

The ticks have brought a surge of Lyme disease in Maine over two decades, boosting reported cases from 71 in 2000 to 1,487 in 2016 — a 20-fold increase, the latest federal data show. Today, Maine leads the nation in Lyme incidence, topping hot spots like Connecticut, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. Deer-tick illnesses such as anaplasmosis and babesiosis — a bacterial infection and a parasitic disease similar to malaria, respectively — are following a similar trajectory.

The explosion of disease correlates with a warming climate in Maine where, over the past three decades, summers generally have grown hotter and longer and winters milder and shorter.

It’s one strand in an ominous tapestry: Across the United States, tick- and mosquito-borne diseases, some potentially lethal, are emerging in places and volumes not previously seen. Climate change almost certainly is to blame, according to a 2016 report by 13 federal agencies that warned of intensifying heat, storms, air pollution, and infectious diseases. Last year, a coalition of 24 academic and government groups tried to track climate-related health hazards worldwide. It found them “far worse than previously understood,” jeopardizing half a century of public health gains.

Yet in Maine, Governor Paul LePage — a conservative Republican who has questioned the science of global warming — won’t acknowledge the phenomenon. His administration has suppressed state plans and vetoed legislation aimed at limiting the damage, former government officials say. They say state employees, including at the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have been told not to discuss climate change.

“It appears the problem has been swept under the rug,” says Mills, who headed the Maine CDC from 1996 to 2011. In the 2000s, she sat on a government task force charged with developing plans to respond to climate change; those efforts evidently went for naught. “We all know this response of ignoring it and hoping it goes away,” she says. “But it never goes away.”

In an emailed statement, LePage’s office denied that the governor has ignored climate change. It cited his creation of a voluntary, interagency work group on climate adaptation in 2013, which includes the Maine CDC. “To assume … that the governor has issued a blanket ban on doing anything related to climate change is erroneous,” the statement said. A recent inventory of state climate activities performed by the group, however, shows that most of the health department’s work originated with the previous administration.

Tripling of vector disease cases

Climate’s role in intensifying diseases carried by “vectors” — organisms transmitting pathogens and parasites — isn’t as obvious as in heat-related conditions or pollen allergies. But it poses a grave threat. Of all infectious diseases, those caused by bites from ticks, mosquitoes, and other cold-blooded insects are most climate-sensitive, scientists say. Even slight shifts in temperatures can alter their distribution patterns.

In May, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a tripling of the number of disease cases resulting from mosquito, tick, and flea bites nationally over 13 years — from 27,388 cases in 2004 to 96,075 in 2016. Cases of tick-related illnesses doubled in this period, accounting for 77 percent of all vector-borne diseases. CDC officials, not mentioning the words “climate change,” attributed this spike partly to rising temperatures.

Heedless officials like LePage are one reason the government response to the human impacts of climate change has been so sluggish. But discord within the health community has stymied action, too, according to interviews with more than 50 public health experts and advocates, and a review of dozens of scientific studies and government reports. State and local health department employees may believe climate change is happening but don’t necessarily see it as a public health crisis, surveys show. Many find it too taxing or nebulous a problem to tackle.

“Like most health departments, we are underfunded and our list of responsibilities grows each year,” wrote one investigator from Arizona, echoing the 23 professionals who responded to a Center for Public Integrity online questionnaire.

The fraught politics of climate change also loom large. Chelsea Gridley-Smith, of the National Association of City and County Health Officials, says many local health departments face political pressures. Some encounter official or perceived bans on the term “climate change.” Others struggle to convey the urgency of threats when their peers don’t recognize a crisis.

“It’s disheartening for folks who work in climate and health,” says Gridley-Smith, whose group represents nearly 3,000 departments. “When politics come into play they feel beat down a little.”

This reality is striking in Maine, among 16 states and two cities receiving a federal grant meant to bolster health departments’ responses to climate-related risks. Under the program — known as Building Resilience Against Climate Effects, or BRACE — federal CDC employees help their state and local counterparts use climate data and modeling research to identify health hazards and create prevention strategies. National leaders have praised the Maine CDC’s BRACE work, which includes Lyme disease.

But the Maine CDC employees declined requests to interview key employees and didn’t respond to written questions. Instead, in a brief email, a spokesperson sent a description of initiatives meant to help people avoid tick bites and Lyme disease. Sources close to the agency say the LePage administration is concerned about tick-related illnesses but not their connection to climate. In its statement the governor’s office said this relationship “is of secondary concern to the immediate health needs of the people of Maine.”

The ticks, meanwhile, continue their northerly creep. In Penobscot County — where the Lyme incidence rate is eight times what it was in 2010 — the surge has unnerved residents. Regina Leonard, 39, a lifelong Mainer who lives seven miles north of Bangor, doesn’t know what to believe about climate change. But she says the deer tick seems “rampant.”

In 2016, her son Cooper, then 7, tested positive for Lyme disease after developing what she now identifies as an expanding or “disseminated” rash, a classic symptom. Red blotches appeared on his cheeks, as if he were sunburned. The blotches coincided with other ailments — malaise, nausea. Weeks later, they circled his eyes. The ring-shaped rash spread from his face to his back, stomach, and wrists.

Leonard says Cooper could barely walk during his 21-day regimen of antibiotics. His fingers curled under his hands. He stuttered. The thought of being bitten by another tick terrifies him to this day.

“At this rate,” Leonard says, “we’re all going to end up with Lyme.”

‘A huge epidemic’

The spread of Lyme disease has followed that of deer ticks. The incidence of Lyme has more than doubled over the past two decades. In 2016, federal health officials reported 36,429 new cases, and the illness has reached far beyond endemic areas in the Northeast to points west, south, and north.

The official count, driven by laboratory tests, underplays the public health problem, experts say. In some states, Lyme has become so prevalent that health departments no longer require blood tests to confirm early diagnosis. The testing process — which measures an immune response against the Lyme-causing bacteria — has limitations as well. It misses patients who don’t have such a reaction. Those who show symptoms associated with a later stage — neurological issues, arthritis — can face inaccurate results. The CDC estimates the actual caseload could be 10 times higher than reported.

Dr. Saul Hymes heads a pediatric tick-borne disease center at Stony Brook University on Long Island, a Lyme epicenter since the disease’s discovery in 1975. He’s noticed a change: Patients file into his office as early as March and as late as November. Often, they appear in winter. Deer-tick samples collected from 2006 to 2011 at the university’s Lyme lab show a jump in tick activity in December and January.

States where Lyme hardly existed 20 years ago are experiencing dramatic changes. In Minnesota, deer ticks and the illnesses they cause appeared in a few southeastern counties in the 1990s. But the tick has spread northward, bringing disease-causing bacteria with it. Now, in newly infested areas, says David Neitzel, of the Minnesota Department of Health’s vector-borne disease unit, “We haven’t been able to find any clean ticks. They’re all infected.” Minnesota ranks among the nation’s top five states for Lyme cases; it places even higher in incidence of anaplasmosis and babesiosis.

A similar transformation is under way in Maine, where the 2017 count of 1,769 Lyme cases represented a 19-percent increase over the previous year. Anaplasmosis cases soared 78 percent during that period, babesiosis 42 percent.

“It’s quite a remarkable change in a relatively short period,” says Dr. Robert Smith, director of infectious diseases at Maine Medical Center in Portland. Researchers at the hospital’s vector-borne disease laboratory have tracked the deer tick’s march across all 16 of Maine’s counties since 1988. Through testing, they’ve identified five of the seven pathogens carried by deer ticks. That’s five new maladies, some life-threatening.

Betsy Garrold, 63, lives on 50 acres amid dairy farms in Knox, a rustic town of 900 in Waldo County, where the Lyme incidence rate is three times the state average. A retired nurse midwife, Garrold says she long viewed the disease as many in the health profession would: mostly benign when treated with antibiotics. In 2013, she tested positive for Lyme after a red, brick-shaped rash covered her stomach and legs. She lost her ability to read and write and struggled to form a simple sentence.

“It was the worst experience of my life,” says Garrold, who previously had weathered bouts of tropical intestinal diseases.

Lisa Jordan, a patient advocate who lives in Brewer, just southeast of Bangor, says she’s already inundated with phone calls from people stricken by Lyme. On her cul-de-sac, she counts 15 out of 20 households touched by the disease. Three of her family members, herself included, are among them. “It’s a huge epidemic,” she says.

‘Disease emergency’ in Canada

The link between Lyme disease and climate change isn’t as direct as with other vector-borne diseases. Unlike mosquitoes, which live for a season and fly everywhere, deer ticks have a two-year life cycle and rely on animals for transport. That makes their hosts key drivers of disease. Young ticks feed on mice, squirrels, and birds, yet adults need deer — some suggest 12 per square mile — to sustain a population.

Rebecca Eisen, a federal CDC biologist who has studied climate’s influence on Lyme, notes that deer ticks dominated the East Coast until the 1800s, when forests gave way to fields. The transition nearly wiped out the tick, which thrives in the leaf litter of oaks and maples. The spread of the deer tick since federal Lyme data collection began in the 1990s can be traced in part to a decline in agriculture that has brought back forests while suburbia has sprawled to the woods’ edges, creating the perfect habitat for tick hosts.

Eisen suspects this changing land-use pattern is behind Lyme’s spread in mid-Atlantic states like Pennsylvania, where the incidence rate has more than tripled since 2010. “It hasn’t gotten much warmer there,” she says.

But climate is playing a role. Ben Beard, deputy director of the federal CDC’s climate and health program, says warming is the prime culprit in Lyme’s movement north. The CDC’s research suggests the deer tick, sensitive to temperature and humidity, is moving farther into arctic latitudes as warm months grow hotter and longer. Rising temperatures affect tick activity, pushing the Lyme season beyond its summer onset.

Canada epitomizes these changes. Over the past 20 years, Nicholas Ogden, a senior scientist at the country’s Public Health Agency, has watched the tick population in Canada spread from two isolated pockets near the north shore of Lake Erie into Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario, the front lines of what he calls “a vector-borne disease emergency.”

Scientists say ticks can use snow as a blanket to survive cold temperatures, but long winters will limit the deer tick, preventing it from feeding on hosts and developing into adults. In the 2000s, Ogden and colleagues calculated a threshold temperature at which it could withstand Canada’s winter. They surmised that every day above freezing — measured in “degree days,” a tally of cumulative heat — would speed up its life cycle, allowing it to reproduce and survive. They mapped their theory: As temperatures rose, deer ticks moved in.

By 2014, the researchers had published a study examining projected climate change and tick reproduction. It shows higher temperatures correlating with higher tick breeding as much as five times in Canada and two times in the northern United States; in both places, the study shows, a Lyme invasion has followed.

The Canadian health agency reports a seven-fold spike in Lyme cases since 2009. “We know it’s associated with a warming climate,” Ogden says.

The U.S. EPA concluded as much in 2014, when it named Lyme disease an official “indicator” of climate change — one of two vector infections to receive the distinction. In its description, the EPA singles out the caseloads of four northern states, including Maine, where Lyme has become most common.

Maine researchers have found a strong correlation between tick activity and milder winters. According to their projections, warming in Maine’s six northernmost counties — which collectively could gain up to 650 more days above freezing each year by 2050 — will make them just as hospitable to deer ticks as the rest of the state.

Maine’s governor nixes climate change research

Research like this is crucial, experts say. Yet the federal government has failed to prioritize it. From 2012 to 2016, the National Institutes of Health spent a combined $32 million on its principal program on climate change — 0.1 percent of its $128 billion budget, says Kristie Ebi, a University of Washington public health professor. NIH spending has gone up in the past two fiscal years, to an average of $193 million annually. But that’s still less than the $200 million Ebi says health officials need annually to create programs that will protect Americans. And NIH spent 38 times as much on cancer research during the two-year period.

Congress has done little to fix the problem. Last year, U.S. Representative Matt Cartwright, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, sponsored legislation calling for an increase in federal funding for climate and health research and mandating the development of a national plan that would help state and local health departments. The bill, sponsored by 39 House Democrats, is languishing in committee. Sources on Capitol Hill say it has no chance of advancing as long as climate-denying Republicans hold a majority.

The only federal support for state and city health officials on climate change is the CDC’s BRACE grant program. George Luber, chief of the CDC’s climate and health program, considers it “cutting-edge thinking for public health.” He intends to expand it to all 50 states, but funding constraints have kept him from doing so.

Republicans in Congress have tried repeatedly to excise BRACE’s $10 million budget, to no avail. Its average annual award for health departments has remained around $200,000 for nearly a decade.

The modest federal response has shifted the burden to state and local health departments, most of which have “limited awareness of climate change as a public health issue,” according to a 2014 Government Accountability Office report. Of the two dozen responding to the Center’s questionnaire, only one said her agency had trained staff on climate-related risks and drafted an adaptation plan.

By contrast, BRACE states are hailed as national models for climate health adaptation. In Minnesota, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont — where deer ticks and their diseases are moving north — health officials have modeled future climate change and begun education campaigns in areas where Lyme is expected to rise.

Dora Mills, the former Maine CDC chief, oversaw the department’s bid for a BRACE grant in 2010. State epidemiologists already were surveying tick-related illnesses, but no one was asking why deer ticks were spreading or which areas were in jeopardy.

One year later, the department launched a program prioritizing vector-borne disease and extreme heat. Some employees worked with experts to model high-heat days and analyze their relationship with heat-induced hospital visits, among other activities. Much of the funding went to climate scientists and vector ecologists, who looked at the relationship between deer ticks and warming temperatures and did a similar study involving mosquitoes. They planned to develop a broader tick model that would examine the climate and ecological processes underlying the spread of Lyme disease in Maine and project its future burden.

By 2013, the administration of Governor LePage, elected in 2010 as a denier of what he called “the Al Gore science” on climate change, was clamping down. Norman Anderson worked at the Maine CDC for five years and managed its climate and health program. He recalls department public relations officials warning him not to talk about his work and refusing to green-light his appearances.

Eventually the governor eliminated the department’s climate change research. Scientists say they had to replace their ambitious modeling plan with rudimentary activities and spend their remaining BRACE funds on “tick kits” — complete with beakers of deer ticks in nymph and adult stages — to distribute to school children.

“Governor LePage said, ‘No one is doing climate change research,’” says Susan Elias, a vector ecologist at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute who worked on the tick-climate research and is developing the broader model for her Ph.D. dissertation. “That message came down from on high through official state channels.”

LePage’s office defended the governor’s decision, arguing that scientists studying the relationship between climate and disease “are best funded in research settings such as large universities,” not the Maine CDC.

LePage did approve a proposal by the Maine CDC to renew its BRACE grant, but only after narrowing the scope. Employees had to abandon planned climate research related to the health impacts of extreme weather and worsening pollen, records show. Their heat research yielded results — indeed, the threshold at which officials issue dangerous heat advisories was lowered from 105 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit after their analysis had found it didn’t protect Mainers’ health. But employees had to scrap their heat-response plans nonetheless. The only BRACE work that LePage approved involved Lyme prevention.

In 2014, Anderson, frustrated by what he calls the “repressive” environment, quit the Maine CDC. The department’s larger “strategy around climate and health had just been whittled away,” he says.

‘Trying to plug holes in the dam’

Today, the Maine CDC’s climate and health program amounts to little more than a half dozen initiatives on ticks and tick-borne diseases. Health officials have developed voluntary school curricula and online campaigns targeting the elderly, for instance. They’ve launched training videos for school nurses and librarians.

The department’s “main prevention message is encouraging Maine residents and visitors to use personal protective measures to prevent tick exposures,” it said in a 2018 report.

That report, filed by the Maine CDC with state legislators, hints at the department’s myopic focus on the accelerating public health problem. Its vector-borne disease work group, consisting of scientists, pest-control operators, and patient advocates, has extensive knowledge on ticks and tick-borne diseases, yet has no mandate to draft a statewide response plan, members say. Its published materials make no mention of Lyme’s connection to climate change.

Sources close to the Maine CDC say the prevention work is the best it can do with limited resources. At $215,000 a year, the BRACE grant — which totals $1.1 million over five years — isn’t enough to cover a 38,385-square-mile state with 1.3 million residents, they say. No state money is directed toward the surge in tick-related illnesses.

LePage’s office cites the governor’s leadership in building an $8 million research facility at the University of Maine, which opened last month. The laboratory — the product of a ballot initiative in 2014 — houses the university’s tick-identification program. Director Griffin Dill considers it a major upgrade from the converted office in which he logged tick samples for five years. It will enable him to expand tick surveillance and test ticks for pathogens. Still, he’s candid about the bigger picture.

“We’re still so inundated with tick-borne disease,” Dill says. “We’re trying to plug holes in the dam.”

Already, another threat is looming. Scientists consider the Lone Star tick a better signal of climate change than its blacklegged counterpart — it has long thrived in southern states like Texas and Florida but is advancing northward. In Maine, tick ecologists have logged samples of the Lone Star species since 2013. Dill has surveyed fields and yards in search of settled populations, dragging what looks like a white flag on a stick over brush. He says the tick isn’t surviving Maine’s winters — yet.

It may be bringing new and unusual diseases here nevertheless. Patty O’Brien Carrier suffered what she describes as a bizarre reaction — itchy hives, a reddened face, a swollen throat — twice before learning that she has Alpha Gal Syndrome, a rare allergy to meat. In February, lab tests identified its source: a Lone Star tick bite. A “ferocious gardener” from Harpswell, 37 miles northeast of Portland, O’Brien, 71, believes she was bitten in her yard. She spends her time in the dirt surrounded by roses, daisies and other perennials. She notices more ticks in her garden, she says, much like she notices the ground thawing earlier each spring.

In November, O’Brien pulled a bloated tick from her neck. It was as large as a sesame seed, concave-shaped and bore a white dot on its back — just like the Lone Star. “Its face was right in my neck and its legs were squirming,” she says. “It was quite disgusting.”

Now O’Brien performs the same ritual every time she goes outside: She applies tick repellant on her clothes and skin. She fashions elastic around her pants, and pulls her knee socks up. She adds boots, gloves and a hat.

“It’s like a war zone out there,” O’Brien says, “and I cannot be bitten by another tick.”

]]>Tick study aims to predict the effect of changing weatherCan green space improve mental health?https://grist.org/article/can-green-space-improve-mental-health/
Tue, 31 Jul 2018 22:12:00 +0000http://grist.org/?p=402828This storywas originally published by CityLaband is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.

More than 43,000 lots in Philadelphia sit vacant, many invaded with overgrown weeds and strewn with trash. As CityLab has previously reported, this is as much a public health problem as it is an economic one. Walking past such a site, researchers have previously found, can make your heartbeat just a little faster, indicating increased levels of stress. And it’s no wonder: Studies have also shown that urban blight tends to attract crime and gun violence.

It’s all taking a toll on the mental health of residents in vacancy-hit neighborhoods. “People felt that [the vacancies and abandonment] fractured ties between neighbors, [affecting] the social milieu of the neighborhood,” says Eugenia South, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine who’s been studying the health effects of urban blight in Philadelphia. People also told her that they “felt stigmatized, neglected by the government,” as well as experiencing “depression, anxiety, stress, and fear.”

While the city scrambles to sell the lots for redevelopment, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society has been working with residents to turn some into parks and community gardens. Now a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association from South and her colleagues points to evidence that their efforts are, in fact, having a positive effect on residents’ well-being. In particular, turning lots into green spaces alleviated the feeling of depression among residents who live in the poorest neighborhoods the researchers studied.

Some lots got the “gold standard” intervention, while others either got a basic cleanup or no intervention. (JAMA Open Network)

The researchers randomly chose 541 lots around Philadelphia and divided them into three groups. Working with the horticultural society over a two-month period in the spring of 2013, the researchers gave one group the greening intervention — what South calls the “gold standard” — in which they graded the land and planted grass and trees. Lots in this group also had low fences installed, which researchers hypothesize increase the beneficial effect by delineating the spaces as being taken care of but not acting as barriers. In another group of lots, they only cleaned up trash and debris and mowed the grass. The third — the control group — received no treatment.

A total of 347 randomly chosen residents living near those lots were surveyed 18 months before the intervention and 18 months after, and asked to rate how often they felt things like anxiety, hopelessness, worthlessness, and depression — based on a tool for screening the prevalence of serious mental illness in a community. None were told the survey had anything to do with the revitalization of vacant lots.

What they found was that in neighborhoods below the poverty line, greening interventions decreased residents’ feelings of depression by more than 68 percent. Meanwhile, residents near lots that only had trash removed saw little improvement. That difference, according to South, strengthened the researchers’ confidence in their findings.

“We wanted to make sure that if we see a difference in the greening group, is it because people were going into the neighborhoods, showing interest and investing in them, or does it actually have to do with green space?” said South.

Lots in Philadelphia were randomly assigned three interventions to strengthen confidence in the findings. (JAMA Open Network)

The study’s finding is in line with what researchers have observed in the past — that strolling through the woods led to more positive emotions, for example, and that Londoners living near trees were prescribed fewer antidepressants. One explanation is that green spaces help us recover from mental fatigue.

“We have a lot of mental input throughout they day, and this is particularly true in urban environments,” said South. “And there is something about the green space itself that allows you to disconnect, to be present without a lot of stimuli coming in.” Green space also allows residents to build relationships with one another, she added, and helps people cope with daily stress.

What does that mean for U.S. cities? South cautioned that the greening intervention is not the “be all and end all” to America’s mental-heath troubles, for which treatment often comes at a premium beyond what low-income families can afford. At the same time, she argued, this wouldn’t be just a Band-Aid project. Rather, it can be an intervention with lasting effect that a city government — or even community groups — can implement in targeted neighborhoods for as little as $1,600 per lot, plus $180 a month for maintenance.

But the lots do have to be maintained, South stressed. And there has to be some kind of infrastructure that allows individuals who want to do this on their own to do so, whether that’s providing financial help or material and supplies.

The study has its limitations, in that the researchers weren’t able to measure the long-term impacts, or exactly how residents interacted with the spaces. South also hopes to study what she describes as the “doses” of green space needed for optimal impact. “So, thinking about green space as a drug, we don’t know how often you’d have to spend time in a green space and for how long,” she said.

But she and her colleagues are sure of one thing — that there is a benefit just to putting in a green space. “We can start to say that there is causation here,” South said. “We rarely say anything so definitively — ever — based on one study, but the strength is [in] the design of the trial.”

You’ve probably heard that more and more people are moving to cities like Seattle and San Francisco and that means they are getting REALLY expensive. But you might not have known that we need those places to be affordable to fight climate change.

Yes, the tears you shed over your rent check are just adding salty drops to the rising sea levels. It doesn’t have to be like this! Watch our video to learn how housing prices are connected to climate change and what to do about it.

Single-use plastics (straws, bags, tiaras declaring you are a “Bitchin Bachelorette”) are the eco cause du jour. Except, by my count, this jour never seems to end. On one hand, I recognize that the disposable plastic accoutrements of our daily lives are an environmental scourge with little redeeming value (except in the case of people who physically require straws to drink) and a symbol of our cultural obsession with convenience at all costs. On the other, full-throated self-congratulatory militancy around the smallest of consumer choices makes me want to go to bed forever. While I abhor a polyethylene wrapper, I also despise anti-plastic sanctimony.

Or, at least, I did. Then I learned that the plastic enemy is an unexpected unifier, sort of like White Walkers or carbohydrates. A plastic bag — or straw, or cup lid, take your pick — has fluttered American Beauty-style onto an unlikely patch of common ground shared by Somalian militants, climate-change-denying Senator James Inhofe, and Vogue magazine. The fact that each of these entities — each of whom I loathe — is fed up with single-use plastics makes me pause for some soul-searching.

Let’s start with Al Shabaab, an Islamist terrorist group that has ruled over parts of southern Somalia since 2011. Al Shabaab believes that Jews are their enemy and women should be servile, so as a Jewish woman I am not confident we’d hit it off. There’s also the fact that they have killed, raped, and enslaved thousands of civilians.

At the beginning of this month, the news hit American shores that Al Shabaab had instituted a plastic bag ban across its territories. Apparently, stray plastic bags are rampant in Somalian brushlands, where they clog the stomachs of indiscriminate Somalian cattle.

Haha! So funny! A terrorist group coming to the same legislative conclusion as a Berkeley City Council meeting! This joke, made by approximately 85 internet news sources in the past week, fails to recognize that Al Shabaab’s environmental policies can affect its hold on power, says Bronwyn Bruton, an expert on African insurgencies with the Atlantic Council, an international policy think tank.

For example, Al Shabaab’s charcoal trade has contributed to a loss of some 438,000 trees across Somalia. That, in turn, has been linked to a famine in the country last year. Al Shabaab lost credibility among Somalians after that, Bruton says. The new policy “could demonstrate learning, that they’re trying to be more environmentally sensitive,” she says. “They’re probably thinking about the famine and the impact they’ve had on the environment.”

Al-Shabaab may be bloodthirsty, misogynistic, anti-Semitic vigilantes who enjoy Twitter, but they also have figured out that plastic pollution is a real, actionable problem.

In an equally surprising twist, so has Senator James Inhofe, author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, who is fond of toting snowballs onto the Senate floor as evidence that justifies his book’s title. Although he does not behead his enemies (to the best of my knowledge), he too hates plastic garbage. Because he loves turtles!

Inhofe is not the only plastic-hating turtle-lover; turtles, as it turns out, play a crucial role in straw awareness. The crescendo of the anti-straw movement first swelled with a viral video of a turtle with a straw in its nose. (Apparently, Kemp’s ridley sea turtles are actually less likely to ingest floating plastic compared to other turtle species, but don’t tell Inhofe that.)

I asked Jeffrey Schmid, Environmental Research Manager at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida: Why the turtle love?

“People just like turtles, and seeing one in harm’s way elicits a very strong response,” he says. Schmid says he finds them fascinating, but it took him a little while; the first time one popped up next to him on a surfing excursion, he thought it was a corpse.

To be honest, he also sounds a little bit baffled by the turtle obsession. “They’re certainly not cuddly if you’ve ever encountered one in the wild,” he says. “Especially the ridleys. They try to bite you, and flap their flippers.”

Hmmm. Perhaps it’s that Senator Inhofe feels more of a personality kinship to the reptiles than sympathy for them, and that’s what drove him to sponsor the turtle conservation legislation.

Me, I fail to relate to congresspeople who spout anti-climate propaganda any more than I do to murderous Islamist militias. So, let’s turn to my personal favorite tool of the patriarchy, Vogue magazine, to which I subscribe despite the fact that its content frequently makes me scream into a throw pillow.

The July 2018 issue showcases the magazine’s most recent deranged approach to sustainability. In addition to profiling billionaire supermodel Gisele Bündchen as “Earth Mother,” the issue includes three personal essays on eco-conscious consumer choices. One author built a “brand new passive house on the coast of Maine.” Hmm. The next: “I will teach my baby daughter to one day slaughter her own meat for dinner.” Alright. Finally: “I haven’t bought a trash bag in two decades.”

Design Scene/Vogue Magazine

Suddenly, Vogue becomes relatable!

Essayist Sloane Crosley writes that her plastic bag stockpile “had become a personal challenge. I was determined to never throw out an empty plastic bag. I became hyperefficient at reusing every last one of them, expertly compacting both bathroom and kitchen detritus until they formed plastic pillows too stuffed to tie … I was on a personal mission.”

For all the sighs and groans I’ve uttered at acts of environmental asceticism, I realized — maybe for the first time ever in reading an issue of Vogue — this is me. I do this. I hoard plastic bags and takeout containers and every spare Tupperware. I meticulously track the fullness of my apartment’s trash cans, to ensure that the bags are absolutely maximized. It’s a neurosis, maybe. But it’s also a form of protest against disposable consumerism. And that actually does matter to me.

I admit it. Even though anti-straw campaigns drive me to head-banging distress, I too am part of the anti-plastic army. In this case, the enemy of my enemies is not, in fact, my friend. I’ve found the harmonious appeal in the banning of straws, the embargoing of plastic bags. And god willing, I will never write about it again.

In May, Grist spent some time walking through avocado and lemon groves on Chris Sayer’s farm in Ventura as he weighed his options. Planting trees is essentially a bet on the weather for the next 30 years: Farmers have to make their best guess as to which ones will withstand the heat.

Avocado trees are vulnerable to extreme weather (hence the title of May’s cover story, “Are Avocados Toast?”), but Sayer resolved to plant a new avocado orchard because that wasn’t his only concern. He also has to think about prices and his own ability to adapt. And for avocado growers, prices and profits have been solid.

“People are just getting used to eating more and more avocados,” said Ed McFadden, who manages several avocado orchards in Southern California. And farmers have a few tricks for coddling trees when the weather tries to kill them. Sayer, for instance, grows a cover crop that protects roots from the extremes of heat, cold, and rain.

Another orchard further inland, away from the cooling influence of the ocean, didn’t fare as well when temperatures reached 117 degrees. There, tender young leaves and developing fruits “turned into jerky.”

“We’ll feel that for a couple of years,” Sayer said. “If this becomes a regular thing, there comes a point where even the most skilled farmer can’t resist nature.”

If those hotter inland groves fry, farmers are likely to establish more orchards along the coast, where temperatures are cooler. At the same time, some farmers and researchers are are working on new varieties that can tolerate extremes. And in places that become unsuitable for avocados, there’s always the possibility of shifting to another crop. As it happens, Sayer’s fig trees loved the heat wave:

]]>AvocadosMost paths to a clean-energy future start the same wayhttps://grist.org/article/most-paths-to-a-clean-energy-future-start-the-same-way/
Tue, 03 Jul 2018 11:04:35 +0000http://grist.org/?p=401022Sometimes the most vicious fights occur over the smallest differences. Brutal battles have pitted Catholics that kneel in prayer against Protestant sects that stood before the same God. There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story from the U.S. House of Representatives about a senior politician explaining that internal conflict between Congressional chambers was more important than fights between Republicans and Democrats. “Republicans aren’t the enemy,” the Democratic old timer says in one version of the story. “Republicans are the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.”

The scientists and activists working to reverse climate change are no different. The infighting can be savage.

It may be a tautology, but “at the most basic level, anyone interested in addressing climate change knows we have to limit greenhouse gas emissions,” said Noah Kaufman, an economist at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. The problem is, those who share that goal disagree about the best way to pursue it.

The roughest head-knocking has been between the energy wonks who think we should use whatever power sources necessary to eliminate emissions — nuclear, biofuels, carbon-capture — and those who think renewable energy is the only answer.

In November, Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford researcher, renewable-energy champion, and a 2016 Grist 50 member, sued a group of scientists for publishing a critique of an influential paper he had written laying out a path for the United States to run purely on renewables. (He later dropped the suit.)

“People tend to either agree on the goals, or on the means — if you want to get something dramatic done you have to agree on both,” said Jane Long, a senior consulting scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund and one of the researchers who critiqued Jacobson’s paper. “I think the kind of changes we contemplate isn’t the kind we can accomplish without alignment of both goals and means.”

Amid all this rancour, it’s easy to forget that all these people are on one side of a climate fight; they agree about more than they disagree.

“Even though [the debate] consumes a lot of my time and other people’s time, it’s sort of beside the point,” Jacobson told Grist. “I’d say there’s no disagreement on 90 percent of our plans.”

So where’s the common ground among all these scientists, academics, and advocates who care about climate change? What are the things that we’re going to need no matter what path we take? Here’s a rundown of broad areas of agreement. Consider it a checklist — or rather, a to-do list — for climate hawks.

You pollute, you pay.

How much do you have to pay to use the atmosphere as a dump for greenhouse gases? For most people and businesses, it’s totally free. Make polluting expensive, and it would cut the amount of greenhouse gases people spew.

“We should all be able to get behind tech-neutral policies to reduce greenhouse gases,” Kaufman said. You could do that by putting a price on carbon — as some 40 countries from Denmark to China have done — or by regulating pollution, punishing companies for releasing methane into the atmosphere. Either one encourages the development of better technologies without causing a fight over exactly which technologies should win.

Grist / Alexandros Maragos

It’s a pattern that runs throughout history. People assume they can pollute for free until the pollution builds up and becomes a serious problem. Then — under duress — they start paying for the trouble. Consider regular old trash. When neighbors live far apart from each other, they can toss garbage out the window without worrying about the consequences. But it’s a different story in cities.

In 1866, New York City told residents they needed to stop the “throwing of dead animals, garbage or ashes into the streets.” Soon, New Yorkers started paying to get their waste picked up. Without a free pass to pollute, the carriage operators who had been leaving dead horses in the streets were at a disadvantage when a new technology came along that didn’t produce piles of manure and leave carcasses behind. At the time, nobody worried that this new horseless carriage would dump carbon into the air. But today that carbon is piling up.

Putting a price on carbon emissions is the same as charging people for the dead animals and ashes they toss into the road. A tax or a regulation curbing emissions would have the same result, Kaufman said. Both would raise the cost of polluting and also raise the rewards for any modern-day Henry Fords developing revolutionary technologies.

Make everything run on less energy

For the better part of human history, creating light often meant tons of work and environmental damage. In the past, people managed to get their light by burning beef fat, storm petrels (a fatty seabird), and sperm whale oil. These were really crappy, inefficient, polluting ways of getting illumination. (It would have taken me at least 10 storm petrels to write this piece, I’m guessing.) Modern LED lights, by contrast, require a tiny trickle of electricity.

It wastes a lot of energy — not to mention birds — if you have teams of workers slaughtering storm petrels, drying them, sticking wicks down their throats, and delivering them to markets. Improving efficiency means cutting out that wasted time and money.

The United States wastes 70 percent of the energy that powers it every day. That’s a massive amount of energy just waiting to be tapped. A more efficient way would use more energy without emitting more carbon.

The most obvious example is gas mileage. Back in 1950, the average car could travel 15 miles on a gallon of gas. By 2010, it could travel more than 23 miles on that same gallon. Cars could get a lot more efficient, still — for every 20 gallons you put in the tank, only five gallons turn into the kinetic energy moving the car; the rest gets wasted as heat. Other obvious steps: replace incandescent light bulbs, insulate homes, get low-gas-mileage cars off the roads. And much else.

“Radical efficiency improvements make it easier to address the climate problem,” said Glen Peters, research director at the Center for International Climate Research in Norway. On this, Peters mused, “I suspect we all agree.”

More sun and wind

In 1977, solar photovoltaic panels were for wild-haired inventors and eccentric millionaires. Back then, the cost of buying a one-watt solar panel was $77; today the cost has fallen to 30 cents. Year after year, the price of solar has cratered faster than the experts predicted. The same is true, to a lesser degree, with wind energy. In many places, wind and solar are simply the low-cost option, which means that building more can save money and also reduce emissions.

Grist

There was general agreement among all the climate researchers I talked to that it makes sense to switch to renewables when it’s the cheapest carbon-free option. The fierce disagreement comes when they talk about paying for renewables when they’re more expensive than, say, nuclear power. Jacobson and a few other scientists think that going 100 percent renewable is the cheapest option. But the majority of researchers think that it would get very expensive to build enough renewables to power the entire country through the darkest days of winter.

“I’ve heard people arguing for 50, 60, 80, and 100 percent renewable,” said Melanie Nakagawa, who worked on climate policy in the Obama administration and now heads up climate strategy for a growth equity fund for climate-related technology at the investment firm Princeville Global. “At some point that percentage matters from a policy perspective,” she explained, but worldwide we’re not close enough to any of those percentages to chill the renewables market. Renewables — mainly hydropower and biofuels — currently account for 10 percent of the country’s energy needs.

Electrify (nearly) everything

Back when President Obama was in the White House, it was Kaufman’s job to go through the various climate plans and scenarios coming from different parts of the executive branch and make sure everyone in the administration was up to speed. He noticed that all the plans to reduce emissions advised plugging a lot more of the country into electricity.

Electricity currently powers a quarter of the U.S. economy. The other three quarters are cars and trucks using gasoline, factories using quadrillions of British thermal units to forge metals and refine petroleum, and buildings heated by gas or propane.

Switching more of these cars and furnaces to run on electricity would allow us to tap into low-carbon energy from renewables and nuclear plants. A little over 1 percent of new cars sold run on electricity right now. To have a shot at keeping global warming under 2 degrees C — the goal set in the Paris Agreement — 10 percent of cars on the road would need to be electric by 2030, according to one scenario plotted by the International Energy Agency.

Grist / Martin Pickard / Getty Images

It’s part of a two-step recipe for eliminating emissions that has become almost a cliche among energy wonks. Step one: Add more low-carbon electricity (solar, nuclear, hydro, wind) to the grid. Step two: Electrify everything.

“There’s broad agreement that we need to dramatically expand electricity to transportation and industry,” said Trevor Houser, climate and energy expert at the research firm, the Rhodium Group. There are some debates around the edges about just how much electrification is practical — maybe not everything — but the consensus is mighty broad.

More electric storage and transmission

Electricity has no shelf life. Unlike a can of tuna that can spend years in hiding, electricity needs to be bought the moment it’s made. Make more electricity than people want at any particular moment, and you can cause fires. Make too little, and you can cause brownouts. That’s why big batteries are so appealing. But even the giant batteries that Tesla is building look tiny if you consider the amount of storage we need to keep the lights on when the sun goes down.

If someone figures out a way to extend the shelf life of electricity on the cheap, it will help in every carbon-cutting scenario, whether it’s 100 percent renewable or 100 percent nuclear.

The other way to handle the mismatch between electric supply and demand is to send electricity farther afield. If it gets really windy in Wyoming, and the turbines there start producing too much juice, the state could send that extra electricity to big cities in California.

Well, it could if a major power line connected the two states.

“The transmission system we have today wasn’t built to get to zero carbon,” said Dan Kammen, Director of Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. “Those power lines don’t go to the best wind areas in the mountain states, they don’t go to the best solar areas in the Southwest.”

Most clean-energy scenarios rely on new transmission wires to connect the places with too much electricity to the places with too little, balancing things out.

More research

Everyone I talked to agreed that the government should be spending more money researching the most challenging problems that stand in the way of weaning ourselves off carbon. It might help to think of climate change as a national security issue, many of them say.

A few years ago, Constantine Samaras, who studies solutions for climate change at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, pointed out on the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog that the government budget doesn’t treat climate change like a true threat. “In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the R&D budget for counterterrorism grew to almost $2.7 billion in 2003,” he wrote, more than a 500 percent increase in two years. The research and development budget for energy technology and climate change was flat. “We correctly reacted to counterterrorism with enhanced R&D after 2001,” Samaras wrote. “Yet on energy and climate change we’re effectively just muddling through.”

Where should research money go? There’s widespread agreement that we should look into a low-carbon solution for air travel and trucks making long-distance hauls. That appears to be where the agreement stops. When I asked what else deserves funding, I heard a long list of options including advanced nuclear reactors, fusion, and turning air into liquid fuel. The consensus fractured.

Looking forward

Ideally, climate and energy experts could sit down and hash out a consensus on a master plan that would, say, allow us to build only the power plants we really need. But experimentation, failure, politics, and infighting seem to be inescapable elements of any ambitious human endeavor. Success is forged in the crucible of conflict, I guess.

But if we get too wrapped up in these captivating fights — all over how we produce electric power — we’ll miss some big opportunities. “We’d be better off if we took some of the creative energy expended on that debate in the power sector and applied it to other sectors — which, by the way produce 75 percent of the emissions,” the Rhodium Group’s Houser said.

That’s exactly the issue: These disagreements concern just a quarter of the pollution problem that’s driving climate change. The sooner we can agree on a way forward, the quicker we can move on to the rest of the problem. And there’s so much agreement among these experts already: They all are trying to cut greenhouse gases, and would like to put a price — or a penalty — on emissions. They’re all for efficiency, electrification, storage, and better power lines. They support renewables that bring down prices. They all want more money to start working on the next generation of innovations.

So … Kumbaya, right?

Not quite. We can’t simply bury the divisive debates. But maybe we can make those debates more fruitful. The EDF’s Long thinks it would help if we stopped talking so much about specific technologies — 100 percent renewable versus nuclear reactors — and started talking more about the things we need those technologies to do: generating heat, supplying inexpensive energy, delivering electricity that can surge on and off to in fill the gaps.

“If we do that, people will be able to see better that there are problems with every choice,” Long said. “So what poison do you pick?”

And like that, sidestepping one debate plunges us into another one, just as crucial and inescapable. Still, the people on all sides told me that, as they debate their choice of poisons, they’d rather not choose poisonous rhetoric.

]]>Shaking HandsWhy it’s OK to change your mind, from a former anti-GMO activisthttps://grist.org/article/why-its-ok-to-change-your-mind-from-a-former-anti-gmo-activist/
Wed, 20 Jun 2018 11:40:20 +0000http://grist.org/?p=400347Once upon a time, shortly after the age of bloodletting, people thought that facts could change minds. It may seem laughable now, but many used to believe they could simply provide evidence that fire is hot, that the Earth is round, or that humans are causing climate change, and others would respond, “Right, I understand now! Thanks for setting me straight.”

It doesn’t work that way, a fact you can see clearly demonstrated in Seeds of Science: Why We Got it So Wrong on GMOs, by Mark Lynas, an environmental activist and science writer. The book, out June 26, seeks to understand why greens, including Lynas himself, saw genetic engineering as an enemy from the very beginning.

In his youth, Lynas snuck out with other anti-GMO activists to destroy fields of biotech corn. In 2013, he formally apologized for his actions 15 years earlier. What changed? Sure, Lynas learned some new facts. But these facts only sunk in after he had earned plaudits as a science writer and begun to think of himself as a member of the scientific tribe. It was only after he started caring about his reputation among scientists that he began to feel threatened by the critique that his ideas about GMOs were “perilously unscientific.” He had to change clans before he could change his mind.

This defection cost Lynas dearly. He was close with two prominent English environmentalists, and his defection strained their relationships to the breaking point. After 15 years of friendship with the environmental columnist George Monbiot, Lynas began thinking of Monbiot as “a hypocrite… stuck in a knee-jerk tribal defense of the Green movement he was so emotionally attached to.”

Meanwhile, Monbiot started to see Lynas as a puppet of an anti-green “new establishment: corporations, thinktanks, neoliberal politicians,” Monbiot wrote. Things were even worse between Lynas and Paul Kingsnorth, the environmental thinker Lynas calls his soulmate. Each had been the best man at the other’s wedding, but they grew to “loathe and detest each other,” Lynas writes.

This story carries a lesson for anyone with some hope of winning over rivals. If changing minds means ripping apart the bonds of friendship, what are the chances that Republicans are ever going to change their minds about climate change? What’s the point of journalism, or science for that matter, when our clans — not facts — determine our opinions?

By the end of the book, Lynas gropes his way toward a remarkably hopeful answer by focusing on the one mind he can change — his own. The first draft of Seeds of Science read like a hippie-punching polemic, he writes. But then he shifted course, deleting whole sections. He sought to appreciate the concerns of anti-GMO leaders and of his friends. He wrote a chapter called “What Anti-GMO Activists Got Right.” In the process, Lynas began repairing the damage done to his relationships with Monbiot and Kingsnorth.

In the midst of these disputes over technology and policy, it’s easy to imagine they are battles that can be won — either by dunking harder on the opposition, or by crafting ever more timid and earnest explanations in the hope of pulling opponents to the other side. But people don’t suddenly switch teams. Lynas’ experience suggests that the most important mind you can change is your own. Set out to win every argument, and you’ll only alienate your friends. The winner gains nothing, while the loser comes away richer in knowledge. The ability to change one’s mind is the ability to grow and adapt — and ultimately to survive.

For the love of all that is holy, let’s stop treating these debates like trench warfare, shelling each other with facts, while insisting on victory or death. Keep your friends. Learn to argue in a way that builds relationships, rather than destroying them. Accept losses gratefully. Grow. Learn. Adapt. Lynas has been through the fire to bring us this insight. Everyone who can take it to heart makes it a little more likely that civilization can grow, learn, adapt, and survive this moment of crisis.

]]>Anti-GMO activists destroy cornNIMBYs could ruin Berkeley’s best chance of fighting climate changehttps://grist.org/article/nimbys-could-ruin-berkeleys-best-chance-of-fighting-climate-change/
Thu, 14 Jun 2018 18:27:04 +0000http://grist.org/?p=399956My hometown, Berkeley, has a long history of making sweeping gestures at the bete noire of the moment. It called for the impeachment of President Donald Trump. It made mobile phones provide radiation warnings. And back in the 1980s, it declared itself a nuclear-free zone.

But now Berkeley has a foe that it could actually do something about. This week the city declared a state of “existential climate emergency” and said it plans to eliminate all city greenhouse gases as soon as possible. The city also pledged to start drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, turning itself into a so-called “carbon sink” by 2030. It hasn’t defined how it will do this.

“Steadily rising temperatures have brought intensified wildfires, drought, and storms that have displaced and threatened thousands of people in California, and millions more around the world. We must act now,” said Cheryl Davila, the city councilwoman who proposed the resolution.

This is the kind of commitment governments around the world would be making if they actually took climate change seriously. Berkeley deserves kudos for taking this first step. The question is, will they take the next step? There are plenty of obstacles in the way: NIMBYs, town politics, and the powerful inertia of the status quo.

Cities that have pledged to eliminate their carbon emissions really can make a difference. In April, researchers found that cities in California can prevent a major portion of the state’s emissions all by themselves. But doing so would require huge changes, including a political reorientation.

The researchers looked at Berkeley specifically and found that the most significant way for the city to shrink its carbon footprint was by building more housing — filling in parking lots and vacant areas.

Building housing is the most significant way Berkeley can shrink its carbon footprint.Jones et al.

The problem is, it’s fashionable to say you support housing in Berkeley, then add a list of conditions and caveats that would make it very hard to to build anything. One of Berkeley’s subway stations is surrounded by a massive surface parking lot, which could turn into condos. But at the first community meeting to discuss the idea in March, neighbors lined up to oppose that change. The city council later opposed a state bill that would have made it easier for the regional rail system to build new housing.

Filling in cities with denser housing makes them more walkable, reducing the distances people have to travel and making transit and bike lanes more effective. Building more housing also allows more people to move into these environmentally friendly cities. Berkeley has traditionally put proposals for new apartment buildings through an exacting and expensive series of public hearings that can stretch on for years. The politics in Berkeley, and in many cities, usually favors existing residents.

Take this week’s meeting, in which the council pledged to eliminate emissions. Minutes earlier, the council had advanced regulations that would ensure new buildings didn’t mess up the views of existing residents. That would add another hoop for any housing development to jump through.

The City of Berkeley is considering new rules to protect views for homeowners in the hills from the scourge of housing.

On the same agenda: A declaration of climate emergency that the city can only meaningfully address with … housing.

It’s understandable that many people want to keep their neighborhoods from changing. After all, they moved to Berkeley because they liked the way the city looked. As a result, things have remained pretty static. The current population stands at around 121,000; in 1950 it was 114,000. If Berkeley really is going to embrace the low carbon transformation, it will also have to change its approach to housing. And it would magnify its effect if Berkeley embraced development and allowed a lot more people to move in and enjoy a low-carbon lifestyle.

That’s just the first of many difficult political fights Berkeley faces. Dr. Janice Kirsch, an activist working with Climate Mobilization who was at the city council meeting on Tuesday, said campaigners are up to the task. “Now begins the hard work. We plan to show up to the city council meetings and hold their feet to the fire. We intend to be relentless.”

]]>Berkeley City HallThe planet wants you to stop eating so much meat and dairyhttps://grist.org/article/the-planet-wants-you-to-stop-eating-so-much-meat-and-dairy/
Fri, 01 Jun 2018 20:24:24 +0000http://grist.org/?p=399145A new, comprehensive analysis came to a regrettable conclusion for all you cheeseburger lovers out there: The earth has a beef with your meat and dairy consumption.

A vegan diet is “probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth,” the University of Oxford’s Joseph Poore, the lead researcher, told the Guardian. He says that giving up meat and dairy makes a “far bigger” difference than cutting down on flying or getting an electric vehicle.

The researchers found that meat and dairy production is responsible for 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. The study, published in the journal Science, represents the most comprehensive analysis of farming’s environmental impact to date. It assessed the production of 40 different foods (representing 90 percent of all that we eat) at 40,000 farms across the world, analyzing their impact on land use, greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and air and water pollution.

If we gave up meat and dairy, we could reduce farmland by more than 75 percent worldwide and have enough food for everyone to eat, the analysis shows.

The results support what the science had already been telling us, even though the researchers took a new approach of gathering data farm by farm. Previous work had used national data to quantify farming’s impact. “It is very reassuring to see they yield essentially the same results,” Gidon Eshel, a Bard College food researcher who wasn’t involved in the Science analysis, told the Guardian.

]]>burger beefNew documentaries bring climate change to the big screenhttps://grist.org/article/new-documentaries-bring-climate-change-to-the-big-screen/
Tue, 29 May 2018 21:07:49 +0000http://grist.org/?p=398961Grist traveled to the tiny mountain town of Telluride, Colorado, to see some of the most talked-about environmental and climate change-related documentaries screening at the Mountainfilm Festival. The films take on the challenge of addressing migration — both of humans and animals around the world — as well as the startling realities of communities facing climate change and environmental degradation today.

In all, there were more than 150 movies and shorts featured during the long weekend, but here’s the lowdown on a few noteworthy films.

If you type “Kiribati” into Google Maps, it takes a while and requires multiple zooms to find it. That exercise is somewhat symbolic because the tiny Pacific island is literally trying to keep itself on the map. Rising sea levels are quickly drowning the home to almost 115,000 people.

Anote’s ArkCourtesy of Mountainfilm

Anote’s Ark follows Kiribati’s former president, Anote Tong, and his frantic attempt to save the land for his people. A perfect example of how poorer nations are more likely to feel the brunt of climate change and extreme weather, the film effectively illustrates the heartbreak of losing one’s home to the ocean — as well as the staggering challenge of relocating an entire country’s population.

While the film is a powerful portrayal of how climate change is impacting communities right now, its various storylines don’t quite connect. The documentary also leaves viewers fairly hopeless — which is true of most films dealing with climate change. But for us at Grist, we’re all about holding out hope.

Tangier Island, off the coast of Virginia, is drowning amid rising sea levels. A school in Denver caters exclusively to students with health issues, specifically asthma caused by air pollution. These are two of the examples of how climate change is already impacting Americans that form the theme of James Balog’s (Chasing Ice) latest work, The Human Element.

Balog uses the four elements — air, earth, fire, and water — to frame how we look at the impact of humans on our climate. In addition to the plight of Tangier and the air pollution in the Mile High city, he follows forest firefighters in California and takes a trip back to the coal mines in Pennsylvania that killed his grandfather.

The dramatic realities of climate change are, well, very scary and honestly depressing. And The Human Element does an excellent job making that abundantly clear. It grounds our understanding of warming in real-world, close-to-home examples that don’t sugarcoat the present or the future. Sure it relies on some heavy-handed scare tactics; but upon reflection, that might be exactly what we need to get our asses into gear.

“If you don’t see any black people or any people of color climbing, you’re not going to think you can do it,” Brothers of Climbing cofounder Mikhail Martin says in this seven-minute minidoc. The organization seeks to reach underrepresented groups and inspire them to take up outdoor activities, starting with climbing.

The short film, presented by REI Co-op, traces the history of the organization, which started with a group of black friends at a New York City gym — not exactly climbing country. It follows the Brothers of Climbing’s trip to the mountains of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they encounter disbelief from others that they are actually rock climbers.

The film is pretty inspiring, and it’s on YouTube, so you don’t even have to travel all the way to Telluride.

Silas Siakor is one of those people whose accomplishments, numerous accolades, and genuine humanity makes you feel like you’ve accomplished absolutely nothing in your life. An activist first and foremost, Silas fights relentlessly to hold the government of Liberia accountable for decades of corruption and environmental destruction. The West African country was once rich with forests, but international companies have demolished one-third of its timber for palm oil plantations, grabbing land from far-flung communities with the blessings of Liberian officials.

The film offers a genuine tale of human strength and resilience in a country still recovering from a 25-year civil war. Its intimate scenes of vulnerability leave the viewer invested in Silas’ mission, while its clips of international leaders heaping praise on former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf leave the viewer awestruck at the outside world’s relatively rosy picture of a Liberian government stained with corruption.

Hot dam! That’s the crux of Blue Heart, a film about Balkan battles over hydropower. The story centers around activists in three countries fighting a handful of the roughly 3,000 proposed dams in the region.

Blue Heart, produced by the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, captures the struggle between environmental activists and energy developers in Albania, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In one story, a group of 55 women blocking a construction project on the Kruščica River are violently removed by police — a scene which bears striking resemblance to recent pipeline fights in the United States.

Here’s the thing: If the world wants to transition away from fossil fuels, hydropower will likely play a role. But hydropower’s reliable renewable energy comes at the expense of river ecosystems and the surrounding communities. The film barely scratches the surface of this conflict between fighting climate change and protecting natural world, instead only focusing on the corporate-greed aspect of dam projects. But at its best, Blue Heart tells a classic underdog story of ordinary people fighting back against energy projects that disrupt and endanger communities — a struggle that’s playing out worldwide.

Summer time! Travel time! Time for a trip! A nice long vacation! You deserve it!

Unfortunately, your big fun trip comes with a big ol’ carbon impact — even bigger than we previously thought, according to a new study. UGH, I know. I guess that means you’re in the market for a carbon offset, which ostensibly neutralizes that impact.

But what does a carbon offset actually do? Sometimes it grows a tree. Sometimes it lights a fire over a garbage dump. Life is full of mysteries, and we investigate all the ones pertinent to carbon offsets in the video above.